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Ben List: I generally had a good time with AC2 but found it generally to be empty of life. Your article clarified my own frustration with the read more

Paul: I can't really comment on Demon's Souls as it hasn't been released here, but wandering into an area that's too difficult for you doesn't sound read more

Rob LeFebvre: Very interesting article, Michael. And congratulations on a monthly column here. I think it's probably a tricky line to manage - the one between interactive read more

Sinan Kubba: I think there's something in what Jorge said, I did great pleasure out of perusing Venice from a tourist perspective, and I found the atmosphere read more

Chris Dahlen: I hated the Valley of Defilement, so much that reading your column brings back the feeling of my skin itching its way off me while read more

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GameSetWatch.com is the alt.video game weblog and sister site of Gamasutra.com. It is dedicated to collecting curious links and media for offbeat and oft-ignored games from consoles old and new, as well as from the digital download, iOS, and indie spaces.

[Abbott's Habit is a new monthly GameSetWatch column by writer and Brainy Gamer blog writer Michael Abbott. This month, he contrasts the game worlds of Demon's Souls and Assassin's Creed II, and explores why artist-conceived environments can be more effective than those drawn from real life.]

One moment in Demon's Souls remains planted in my memory deeper than any other, and it has nothing to do with defeating a boss or acquiring a prized weapon.

I was cautiously winding my way through the Valley of Defilement, gingerly traversing rotted planks of wood, peering through a dank mist for poisonous bugs and deranged goblins, and carrying 10,000+ hard-won souls (the game's currency) with me. It was a big mistake.

I should have played it smart and returned to the Nexus, cashed in my souls and leveled up. But curiosity about an unexplored region got the best of me, and soon I found myself knee-deep in a decrepit, plague-ridden swamp with too few healing herbs and no clear idea how to get out.

Health slowly draining and vaguely aware of a sloshing menace in the water ahead of me, I knew that dying would mean losing everything I had worked hours to acquire. I needed a moment to stop and think, but Demon's Souls offers no pause button. It was then that I noticed my hands - sweating, wrapped in a death grip around my controller. I was scared.

It's been a long time since a video game did that to me. When I reflect on how and why it happened, I realize that the defining component of Demon's Souls isn't its bosses or RPG elements. The thing that makes Demon's Souls such a scintillating experience is its environments.

To be sure, the game has its share of nasty creatures, mostly pathetic, moaning wanderers who seem desperate to be relieved of their misery. But in places like the Valley of Defilement, the environment itself challenges the player in more dastardly ways than its inhabitants. One slip, and you're dead. One overlooked hole in the floor, and you're finished.

Mismanage your inventory in the swamp, and the plague will get you. Darkness, disease, and blind leaps to landings you hope will be there - all can lead to your demise. Even Demon's Souls' rats threaten less with their bites than their ability to divert your attention from the ledge you'll fall off trying to kill them.

Worse (or better, if we're measuring clever design), other players can alter your thinking about the game's locales by leaving messages intended to "help" you. If you encounter a player-posted message on a cliff-edge encouraging you to jump, will heeding it yield a valuable prize or plummet you to your death? The uncertainty is unsettling, but also, somehow, deeply alluring.

Discovering ways to turn the game's environments to your advantage (locating safe spots or ideal sniping locations, for example) provokes an impulse to share your knowledge with others, and the game's rating system promotes messages that players consider helpful. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to leaving a message or two luring other players into an ugly fate. Why should I be the only one who suffers, eh?

It took time for me to fully appreciate the impact of Demon's Souls' environments on my experience as a player. The game's notorious difficulty can stifle analysis. In my own case, the game subverted my natural tendency to stand both inside and outside my gaming experience. It's hard to be analytical when you're fighting for your life. Demon's Souls also has a way of enveloping you in its systems, luring you into hours of fiddling with your stats and massive inventory, which can be neither sold nor traded.

The genius of Demon's Souls' environments was finally thrown into stark relief after I finished it and moved on to another game: Assassin's Creed II. Acknowledging the stark differences between the worlds these two games depict, I can't resist comparing them.

When I learned that Florence would serve as one of AC2's major settings, my excitement for the game grew. I know the city well, and I was curious to see how the game would render a 15th century version of it. Having progressed far enough in the game to roam, I did what I'm sure lots of Firenze-philes do: I headed straight to the Duomo.

It's a credit to the game's designers that even in its compressed form, the city is laid out realistically enough to find one's way to the Duomo by relying on familiar landmarks. Along the way, I marveled at the game's colors and textures. Even the sky seemed just the right shade of blue. Arriving at the Duomo, I walked around the Basilica, mouth agape, amazed by the fidelity. I climbed several surrounding buildings for a better view. I handed my wife the controller so she could have a look. We both smiled in amazement.

And there my love affair with AC2's virtual Florence ended. I returned to playing the game, and the city receded into its role as a backdrop. To be sure, it's a beautiful, astonishingly faithful (and climbable) backdrop...but as game environments go, it's hardly more than that. One can walk its streets full of people, visit vendors, and pick up side missions, but the experience feels scripted and automatronic.

Progressing to Venice and other locales feels like a cut-and-paste operation; aside from city-specific features, it's more of the same ambling groups of monks, prostitutes, citizens, and vendors. The opportunity here - imbuing a vibrant Italian city with life and bringing that energy to bear on the player - takes a back seat to a conveyor belt experience with map marker missions. Beauty, in this case, is truly only skin deep.

Of course, one might suggest that dynamic environments simply aren't necessary in a game like AC2. It is, after all, a third-person action-adventure game, and exotic locales need only function as backdrops in such games. But such thinking is needlessly self-limiting. Demon's Souls, an action-RPG similarly situated in a fixed set of genre conventions, demonstrates the value of upending such conventions by creating a game world that outshines even its most outrageously fiendish bosses.

By designing all of its five environments as dynamic, self-contained worlds, each visually and sonically distinctive and each requiring different strategies from the player, Demon's Souls jettisons the notion that an RPG (particularly a Japanese RPG like Demon's Souls) must place all its genre chips on bosses, quests, and stats.

Assassin's Creed II seems to want to deliver an open-world experience to the player, but for the most part that world is look, but don't touch. The game offers two awkwardly implemented city tours (the first carrying a box through Florence for Leonardo Da Vinci; the second a walking tour of Venice courtesy of Alvise da Vilandino), but these introductions serve little meaningful purpose since the only real rewards for exploring are locating hidden chests, feathers, glyphs, and other collection-oriented gameplay add-ons. Despite their extraordinary visual presentation, these great Italian cities usually function as little more than labyrinths for acrobatic chase sequences.

Imaginative artist-conceived game worlds can draw players in and entice them to explore the unknown, accentuating discovery of a landscape unbound by the limits of verisimilitude. Demon's Souls' crumbling derelict world visually reinforces the sense of despair and moral decay that defines the player's experience in Boletaria. The world itself feels alive and unfixed, a hostile force to overcome.

Assassin's Creed II's Florence, Venice, and Rome aren't meant to convey menace, and they exist to serve a very different game. But aside from provoking astonishment at the power of a game engine to render accurate re-creations of real places, it's hard for me to feel connected to these virtual places. I can appreciate the technical achievement, but I'm hard-pressed to understand how that achievement serves Assassin's Creed II as a game, aside from offering the player a lovely set of postcards and a birds-eye view.

[Michael Abbott is writer and host of the Brainy Gamer blog and podcast. He teaches theater and film at Wabash College, as well as a seminar course devoted to the art and history of video games.]

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15 Comments

Great post Abbott. If you ever get the chance, there is a book called 'Experiencing Architecture' by a dude named Rasmussen. One of the points he makes is what you're talking about when distinguishing AC2 and Demon's Souls. He compares two people at a cathedral: a kid playing wall ball and a tourist. The kid playing wall ball has a spatial awareness of the building and appreciation for its structure that is totally different from someone like the tourist who just walks in and looks around. He makes similar points: that it's not enough to have a big beautiful building. Its got to have purpose and use that help create the meaning and sense of awe.

I would be interested to read a part B where you discuss how you would have altered AC2s environments to be more systemically engaging, or what systems you would have added/altered to give the player more varied and meaningful interaction with the world.

A few months back I wrote a piece on the original AC where I basically argued that the team confused setting with scenery. The original game is quick to flavor the game with famous sites in the Holy Land, and some local flavor in the form of thickly-accented merchants and beggars... but there's nothing really animating it. I never feel like I'm standing in a Jerusalem sidestreet because the game never convinces me that I'm playing in a world where religion is tinged with desperation and hatred, or a world where people live in terror of the arrival of yet another occupying army. It's just a set where you climb, run, and fight.

The problem you describe seems to be one that we often encounter in historical fiction. It's easier to make an artist-conceived gameworld conceptually complete because everything in that world was, or should be, placed there for a reason. Utilizing historical places and times requires really understanding them. Look at how E.L. Doctorow or Caleb Carr master the details of whatever eras they write about: what were people thinking about, what music did they listen to, where would they meet for dinner, and what would they eat?

It's all the stuff that can't be faked by name-dropping major historical figures or having characters tripping over landmarks. It's all the stuff that convinces an audience that the story really is taking place in a world, and not on a stage.

Great post. I'm curious what your take is on Metal Gear Solid’s Shadow Moses environment. I feel it is more akin to AC2 than Demon Souls since so it primarily functions as a backdrop. Despite that, the setting made enough of an impression that I can distinctly recall the layout along with numerous other minor details many years after playing that game. Do you think the fact that the setting in AC2 is so closely modeled after a real historical place sort of takes something crucial away? Maybe Assassins Creed 2’s problem is not the environment’s lack of hostility but its failure to provoke our imagination.

Also, I really have to ask because you so slyly left us in suspense. Did you make it out of that swamp in Demon Souls?

Thanks for the comments. This being my first column here, I'm especially grateful for the feedback.

GhaleonQ: :-)

L.B.: You're the 3rd person this week to recommend 'Experiencing Architecture' to me, so clearly I need to grab and read this book ASAP. I don't address architecture per se in my piece, but it's obviously lurking behind much of what I'm seeing and experiencing in these games. Not being a designer, I'm curious to know the extent to which architectural design theories affect the work of game designers. A little? A lot? I don't know.

Rich: I was afraid someone would ask me this question. I honestly don't have an answer. I'm coming to this purely from the perspective of a critical player, finding stimulation from one game world and significantly less from another. I think the trick is integrating my interactions in Florence/Venice/Rome with the narrative in ways that reinforce what the storytelling seems to want me to think and feel. Fallout 3 offers some useful models for this, I think. The sense of place I get there via a variety of settings and interactions supports the story I'm piecing together and creating myself. They feel unified, rather than disjointed or contradictory. Florence in AC2 feels like painted scenery and the life of the city is restricted to only those elements of immediate use to me.

Rob: The stage metaphor you use is apt, I think, because it suggests a fabrication easily unmasked by peering behind the flats. On the other hand, as a theater guy I know we like make-believe places, and we often like them more when their fabricated nature is exposed to us. So, in a way, the problem with AC2 (as you suggest) is that it purports to be an historical time and place come to life, but we know it isn't. So maybe the game should have been more self-reflexive in this way. Constructing fragments of things and slivers of reality, exposing the fact that it's all just a big re-creation. When we watch each city being digitally constructed before our eyes in AC2, the game sort of suggests it may do exactly that, but then it sort of forgets all about it.

Lazaro: Yeah, I did make it out of that swamp. Eventually. A big supply of plague cure potions finally got me over the hump.

This won't quite answer your question, but the thing that intrigues me about Shadow Moses is Kojima's canny recreation of it in MGS4. This strikes me as yet another way to think about how environments affect us. The MGS player with a bit of history stumbles upon this place in MGS4, and suddenly his head fills with memories and a sense of strange recognition. Maybe Kojima goes a little overboard with the self-referential stuff sometimes, but coming upon Shadow Moses in MGS4 and using the memory of it to my advantage was pretty cool.

Funny, I was just thinking to myself how the constraints of a historical setting (as opposed to one designed from scratch for gameplay) made AC2's environments *more* immersive and fun for me (compared to, say, AC2's own assasin tomb sequences) because I didn't find myself asking "what am I supposed to do?" now (the "supposed to" part would remind me that I am playing something someone designed and take me out of the experience).
I think the difference here is that I play AC2 for the running and climbing and assassinating and pretending I'm so agile and cool, not the historical thingies, so the open roamable pretty world works very well for me.

Oh yeah, forgot something
I thought "look, but don't touch" was an interesting choice of words for Assassin's Creed, considering that the point of the game is that you can literally grab onto almost any part of the environment with your dirty assassiny hands.
So again, I think we have different expectations for what "touching" should be in a game.

I always got the feeling from AC2 that it was MEANT to feel like a post-card. I wonder if your feelings towards the game would have been different if you were only familiar with the 'Tourist Florence' instead of the intimate-Florence.

Michael, your comments echo a conversation LB Jeffries and I recently had over on his blog regarding the effect cel shading has on audience. We both seemed to agree that there's real benefit in letting a game's artificiality remain visible to the audience.

However, I would say that works in games, movies, and theater because the artists make the setting convincing, regardless of how realistic the representation of it is. I guess what I'd like to get your views on is how AC2 could have breathed that same sort of conviction into its high-fidelity re-creation. With a stage production it might be as simple as having good blocking, some evocative lighting, and actors who can bring the script to life.

But how do you bring that same liveliness into a gameworld where the player is going to be wandering around unpredictably, probably more concerned with immediate threats or distant objectives? Does the nature of the game render the setting into a pretty backdrop?

I hated the Valley of Defilement, so much that reading your column brings back the feeling of my skin itching its way off me while I played through it. It's the most disgusting, unpleasant game level I can remember playing, which of course is just more proof that it worked.

I think Michael is being modest by not mentioning that he has, in fact, beaten Demon's Souls.

I think there's something in what Jorge said, I did great pleasure out of perusing Venice from a tourist perspective, and I found the atmosphere of the place much warmer, more enjoyable than any other locale in the game.

I wish I could comment on Demon's Souls, it doesn't look set to arrive in the UK which is a crying shame. I think I'll be forced into importing it.

Very interesting article, Michael. And congratulations on a monthly column here. I think it's probably a tricky line to manage - the one between interactive environment and pretty backdrop - that may have more to do with the gameplay itself. Demon's Souls environment seems to work like a platformer - enemies and falls are equally dangerous. In AC, at least, having not played AC 2, I never felt truly hampered by the environment - falls or bosses - except in those moments when I couldn't climb a wall fast enough to evade the city guards. The issue was more of the environment having a lack of what I needed, rather than of it being overtly hostile and against me.
Anyhow, great post, and as Chris says, above, I cannot believe you've actually beaten Demon's Souls. When your Confab guests provoked that fact out of you, and the hours of gameplay you've put into it, I had to laugh and shudder in awe at the same time. It's clearly a game that's gotten under your skin.

I can't really comment on Demon's Souls as it hasn't been released here, but wandering into an area that's too difficult for you doesn't sound look like paradigm shifting design to me. Although, that such memorable events can happen is laudable. On the other hand, the fear that comes from losing all your progress strikes me as particularly cheap and easy. The dynamic message and world interaction is something a lot more games should look to, I'm really interested in playing that.

You make valid complaints about AC2, but I feel you're being overly harsh. The difference in architecture I could instinctively feel in each city through the game's mechanics was impressive.

I generally had a good time with AC2 but found it generally to be empty of life. Your article clarified my own frustration with the game, but also triggered some thoughts about what might be done to improve on it.

AC2 is built by essentially copying and pasting of assets, with perhaps 95% or more being used and re-used "filler" in the various outdoor environments and 5% or so design-specific to the more iconic landmarks. Once the user gets accustomed to this, one gets into a mindset where every structure ceases to exist as a living environment, becoming "stage flats" which serve no purpose except for climbing and traversing. The landmarks at first to hold more promise for events, but then ultimately end up being simply backdrops for copy-paste missions.

Fallout 3 is works largely because of its variety, and the constant sense that the exterior "flats" contain an interior life, less copy-paste environments, or at least a balance weighted more towards landmarks and less towards the filler. Also its conveyance of history and context via the way assets are staged, or how windows to the past are revealed through the text left on computer terminals, enough "random" or "triggered" encounters, all together contribute to the feeling that there is history in a living and breathing space, lending to the sense of immersion, and encouraging further exploration.

That said, it works just barely. There is enough copy-paste in that world that it frequently pulls one out of the immersion as the feeling of "seen that, done that" and frequent artificial walls remind one that they are playing a game with defined limitations. Also more priority is put into the environments, rather than into the people there, who occasionally talk to each other in oft-reheard scripted conversations, but are generally no more than walking, sitting, and sleeping mannequins.

Specific suggestions for AC3 would include:
- more variety in the filler
- additional "sub-landmark" types
- implement more indoor environments for the landmarks and a good number of sub-landmarks at the least.
- implement "random" or "triggered" missions (perhaps between missions")